Growing With My Garden

      Much of the reading for this week depicts people helping people and illustrates the role which helping others plays in spiritual growth, both in those who extend help, and those who receive it.  MacDonald explains that when the “love-heart” of a person is active in helping others, then “his mind is one with the mind of his Maker; God and man are one.” Polwarth meets Juliet on the grounds of the Drake properties and subtly attempts to be a help to her.  When torrential rains come, Juliet flees and finds shelter in the Polwarth’s gate house.  In their whole-hearted and gentle ministration to her needs she begins to experience peace of heart.  Houses throughout Glaston are flooded.  Wingfold and Helen use a boat to bring help to stranded people, as does Faber.  The Wingfolds do it happily; to Faber it is a difficult and arduous task.  Drake and Dorothy heartily take people into their home.  In a incident in which Amanda alm...

There is considerable rhetoric in our reading for this week, contained in the conversations between Wingfold and Faber, and in Wingfold’s sermonizing. MacDonald fills his novels with his own convictions as to the nature of Christian truth and prescriptions for Christian living, but I don’t think any are as replete in these regards as this novel.  In all the authors I have read, I have not encountered any whose insights seem so penetratingly true (and I have greatly profited from the works of so many).  It is why I keep returning to his works.  Below is a sampling of quotations that strike me: “Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent . . . . Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion. . . . Peace is for those who do the truth, not those who opine it.”   “But love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak, the love will be felt where the truth is never percei...

 .   One way to view this novel is to see it as a profound study in the centrality of love to life.  The first and second commandments affirm that the most important thing in life is to learn how properly to love God and others, and this may be seen as MacDonald’s primary purpose in writing this novel.  He gives his readers profound meditations on the nature of God’s love, and he proceeds to depict a variety of love relationships:  Wingfold  and Helen, Drake and his daughter, Faber and Juliet  All love relationships in this life are imperfect; the essence of heaven is that of perfect love, in which the redeemed community are perfectly bound together in love with God and with each other.  Scripture depicts it as marriage between Christ and his church.   The relationship between Drake and his daughter, strong as it is, illustrates some severe shortcomings.  Dorothy’s love for her father is admirable but inadequate because o...

In his writings MacDonald never misses an opportunity to underscore his deep convictions as to the nature of God, and Chapter 17, beginning with a portrait of Faber’s atheistic thinking, includes yet another excellent statement as to the nature of God that, sadly, so many theologians, who feel a need to have an abstract system of thought that excludes paradoxes, distort.  And his analysis of the atheist’s thinking is quite perceptive and helpful.   Juliet was raised under the tutelage of the type of narrow thinking MacDonald wants to expose and, when she opposes Faber’s common sense with it, it seems inadequate. When he pleads his love for her, she sternly rejects him; nevertheless, he persists, and she begins to capitulate. Chapter XVIII begins by observing that Bevis is growing spiritually under the teachings of Wingfold.  MacDonald observes that Christians grow through various phases, and the more they grow, they more they acquire a more accurate ...

Our reading for this week begins with a lengthy description of Rev.Walter Drake, a retired minister of dissenting congregations. In England, the state church is Anglo-Catholic, and its members enjoy the higher social standing, but there are several protestant churches–Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, etc.–all of which were referred to with a certain social snobbery as “dissenters.” Drake is a dissenter, as was MacDonald, until he joined the Church of England in 1866. In his description and evaluation MacDonald speaks from his own experience. He began his career in the early 1850's as a minister of a Congregational Church in Arundel, a coastal town in southern England. His experience there was an unhappy one.       Also, MacDonald may well be drawing upon his own pastoral experiences when he presents and the effect of Wingfold’s sermons on his congregation. The Arundel congregation, so disturbed by the emphasis upon obedience to Christ’s commands t...

In his novels George MacDonald is primarily concerned with leading his readers into a knowledge of the true nature of God and how he works in the lives of individual people.  He saw in his day an increasing neglect in the general public of these subjects, and he felt deeply that a proper understanding of, and a right response to, these issues was of vital importance for each reader, both for time and eternity.  In his day–long before the cinema and television–the novel was a widespread source of entertainment and, having a love of and a gift for telling stories, he strove to use it as a means of expressing these concerns and propagating his understanding of them.  Thus in Paul Faber: Surgeon, we have an array of personality types and our minds are focused on how God is working in the lives of each.  Various passages in our novel may seem like sermonizing, but they are among the most insightful that he wrote in his long career and extremely helpful in bringing us ...

George MacDonald was writing this novel during the mid 1870's, an especially difficult period in his life.   Their second daughter Mary, beautiful and vivacious, now in her mid 20's, was suffering from tuberculosis and steadily declining in health.  Desperate to do all they could to save her, the family determined to take her to the Mediterranean area in the hope that such a change climate would stem the progress of the disease; however, raising the necessary money to do so was a forbidding challenge. The family was finally able to put together enough to afford Louisa’s taking Mary and some of the family to southern Italy while MacDonald and two of his other daughters remained  at the Retreat, their home on the Thames in a suburb of London.  Struggling with ill health himself, he was writing Paul Faber: Surgeon, a sequel to the recently published Thomas Wingfold: Curate, in the hopes that the selling of it would yield them sufficient funds so that he and the...